Landfill of wisdom

I just had a very hard time trying to change my address on the JAL Mileage Bank page. They still had my address from about 4 years ago which changed at least a couple of times since then. When I tried to change it I realized why.

I submitted the form, properly filled with full-width characters (including the digits) and on the confirmation screen I get the same form filled with mojibake asking me to complete it correctly. You have guessed already - nothing I type in there would actually help.

Firebug to the rescue! I opened the form in Firebug, added an enctype=”multipart/form-data” to the form element and surprise, surprise - my input was accepted.

Finally! A set of fonts that look good and properly display Japanese and Cyrillic. That is, the Cyrillic is half-width as it is supposed to be. For Gentoo users the package is media-fonts/efont-unicode or there is the official page for everyone else. Some characters like the lowercase б and д are oddly designed but that’s a very small price to pay for the pleasure of not having to mix and match different fonts in my terminal configuration.

I wish I’d known that a little earlier.